Crime Blog

Baltimore police officials take creative approach to preventing crime

The city of Baltimore has been immortalized by gritty shows like “The Wire” and “Homicide: Life on the Street” that showed its criminal underbelly.

It is also home of the Stop Snitchin’ campaign, a movement by criminals so bold that they even made a video and T-shirts boasting of efforts to convince people not to help law enforcement. It is also the place where in October 2002, a couple and their five children were killed in a firebombing in retaliation for complaining to police about drug dealing in their East Baltimore neighborhood.

Baltimore officials knew they could not arrest their way out of the city’s overwhelming problems, although they did engage in a systematic campaign to arrest the folks who made the “Stop Snitchin’” video.

So the city of 650,000 has gone on the offensive. Police made their own video and their own T-shirt depicting handcuffs and the words, “Keep Talking,” a reference to the thugs in the “Stop Snitchin” video who had boasted of their criminal prowess.

In the aftermath of the firebombing deaths, they also partnered with housing officials to offers emergency housing relocation services to people who have been threatened with violence.

“We’ve moved over 50 people and their families,” said Baltimore police Lt. Col. Rick Hite, commander of the youth services division that works with troubled inner city youths. “If someone is looking to attack a family, we will put them in a safe haven. We then go back and target the threat.”

Col. Hite tells of a case in point.

The 14-year-old Baltimore gang member had been ordered to rape his 13-year-old sister. “They gave him a mission and he had to rape her in front of his boys,” Lt. Hite said.

The teen was willing to do other things but this wasn’t among them. So he told his mother and his mother called the police. There might have been a time when the police would have viewed the kid as a suspect.

Instead, he viewed the kid as a victim too, because so often these kids are severely beaten or even raped as part of their initiation into the gang. The kid, his mother and sister were relocated.

In 2005, police officials also created a program called “Get out of the Game,” complete with a 24-hour hotline and glossy brochures depicting a gravestone, that offers help in escaping their criminal lives.

Col. Hite, a bear of a man, is so fiercely dedicated to the program that he sometimes pounds the pavement himself to help them find jobs, believing that society saves far more by giving them a helping hand than a backslap.

Police also go into the prisons and talk to prisoners. “When you want to know what’s going on on the streets, you go into the institutions,” Col. Hite said.

It is not a one-size-fits-all approach. Each situation demands a different response. There have been times when police have found out about contract hits and have gone to prisoners who are relatives of the would-be victims with the information.

“We let them know what we know,” Col. Hite said. He said they will appeal to the prisoner to help them try to convince the would-be victim to abandon the thug life. There have been real successes with that approach and deaths have been prevented, he said.

They also work with former gang members, who can help stop violence in the neighborhoods before it happens.